There is bad stuff going down in Burma right now, our children will all be obese by the year 2010 and by the way, footless tights are OUT but leggings are back IN.

Is life not complicated and difficult enough without having to worry about what things are fashionable or unfashionable?

Shall I use balsamic vinegar in my salad dressing or is it 'Down'. Is cider vinegar 'Up' this week or did I just read something about it being good for arthritis in a health column's 'Do' box?

Reminds me of my magazineediting days when my sister was comforting me over a headline which I allowed to go to print with an instruction to 'Put Headline Here'. She told me of a 'Do! Don't!'

column which once appeared in a large, reputable British women's magazine . . . the yellow and red box was filled with the words 'Please write any old s*** here, please write any old s*** here'. It was cheering to know that other, better-paid people, were as bad at their jobs as I was.

Do/Don't lists are not important . . . and in fairness to the people who write them they are not intended to be taken as such but knowing this does not stop me from allowing them to feed my low-level could-do-better anxiety. There are people capable of taking no notice of such fripperies, but sadly I am not one of them. I say I am, I think I am and then . . . BAM! . . . I am standing at the tights section of Dunnes musing over a pair of legwarmers or turning my nose up at goat's cheese because it's 'passe', then panicking because maybe it was 'passe' before and now it's 'Back In!'

It's not like I am completely neurotic or have nothing better to do. I have loads of very important stuff to do and consider myself a reasonably lackadaisical, tolerant type. It's just that I am drawn to the type of recreational media material that makes me feel guilty.

I always just said I wasn't interested in gardening, but when they started to put gardening programmes on prime-time television that all changed and I became a failed gardener. One of these pathetic people who would love to have a nice garden but is too lazy and stupid to go out and gets their hands dirty. Rather like those laughable idiots who are still using balsamic vinegar in their salad dressing, or gauche females who have neglected to trade in their opaque tights for patterned ones.

Interiors programmes are the worst, bringing years of blood, sweat and tears tumbling down as you watch somebody transform their shabby living room into a lounge in the Four Seasons with two bits of re-cycled foam and a tin of Dulux they found in the shed.

On a bad day, even real news and documentaries make me feel guilty. I shouldn't be sitting here watching/reading this. I should be in Darfur/Soweto feeding refugees/building houses. Travel supplements . . . they have to go straight in the bin. I've seen nothing of the world . . . been nowhere! Arts . . . when was the last time I went to the theatre . . . I'm a complete philistine.

By far the worst are these prescribed parenting programs.

These are the only programmes that make me feel so guilty . . . they propel me into actual action. My poor son doesn't know whether he's coming and going with star charts and naughty steps all implemented in a half-hearted only-makes-things worse kind of way. I don't have especially lowself-worth but there is a corner of my psyche that is obviously lacking, and it is into this corner that the media seems able to frenzily feed. Alcohol is grand stuff, but in the hands of an alcoholic it becomes deadly. Ditto Do/Don't lists to the slightly insecure and gardening programmes to the foolishly ambitious. They're not supposed to make you feel stupid and bad, but they do.

Of course, there is a fix. Big Brother and/or Hello! magazine.

The best way to dig yourself out of the media guilt pit is to trade down. Bad and all as I am at least I've not resorted to reality television/plastic surgery.